Jeff Blakeney <
CUTjeffre...@yahoo.ca> wrote:
>It has been a long time since I played with my SCSI hardware. I have a
>couple CFFAs now. What's worse is I hardly ever turn on the hardware
>anymore. Finding time to do all the things I want is always a problem.
Still actively using a SCSI Jaz and Zip drive on my IIGS (most of my SCSI
hardisks have failed or too noisy), but not sure I'd be able to ever switch
to a CFFA after being spoiled by the speed of the RamFAST. Yep, I hear
you about time these days!
>I believe at one point I was using a RamFAST with v3.01ez firmware (I
>think v3.01f was the latest)
Yep, 3.01f was the final, but only 1 byte changed from 3.01e (the "ez"
I do remember was for the putting the Zilog CPU into Hitachi mode on
Sequential System boards). As for what the differences are for the U16
ROM on the older revision C board, that's what I'm curious about.
>that I had connected to a 1.2 GB SCSI hard drive. I had an Apple High
>Speed SCSI card connected to a CD-ROM drive.
The RamFAST had issues with devices 1 GB or larger, though I've been
able to use it with my 1 GB Jaz drive with some moderate success. The card
though did not support SCSI arbitration which caused incompatibilities with
several newer drives at the time. Is it possible your Apple HS SCSI was
connected to the 1.2 GB, not the RamFAST?
> I'm pretty sure the RamFAST did work with the CD-ROM drive but because
>I had such a large hard drive with 11 ProDOS and 1 HFS partitions, that
>used up all 12 partitions the RamFAST firmware could handle so I put the
>CD-ROM on a separate controller.
Had that issue back in the day, still do. My solution was to disable some
of the hardisk partitions whenever I inserted a CD-ROM disc. Swapping
partitions in and out as I needed them.
>Also, if I recall correctly, the RamFAST couldn't detect when you changed
>disks in the CD-ROM drive but the AHS card could.
I believe that was resolved in the later firmware updates. I know for
certain with my RamFAST D (ROM 3.01ez) I can pop CD's in and out while
in the IIGS Finder and new discs appear on the desktop.
Also noticed while working on the IIe, if I swapped CD's while in the
RamFAST C's built-in menus, and pressed control-E, it detected the new
discs without the need to restart the computer.
>As you are planning on just hooking up the CD-ROM drive, I don't think
>it really matters which card you use as you would be rebooting all the
>time anyway so being able to detect a disc change isn't important.
>However, with the RamFAST, I think you would have to access the firmware
>(I believe it was hold down the zero key when booting) and map any
>partitions on the CD to get them to show up properly.
Yes, and it works quite well with the Zip drive I'm testing it with!
I'm curious if it would be as flexible with the Apple High Speed SCSI
card, detecting the ProDOS partition and booting it directly. I'm also
curious how it fares in terms of speed--the RamFAST really flies with
ProDOS-8! I may pop in an Apple board just to see the difference...
>I'm 99.9% sure that you can boot CD-ROMs on the Apple II but I couldn't
>tell you how to set one up or even if both types of SCSI card support
>it. I think that some of the CD-ROMs that exist for the Apple II are
>bootable. I'd have to pull out my collection or do some online research
>to find out and see if there are any details on how it was accomplished.
I do remember booting YourWordBox CD-ROM directly from my
RamFAST SCSI on the IIGS. Interesting thing is the Apple IIe is
attempting to do the same. I popped in that same CD-ROM and got
the message "GS/OS REQUIRES APPLE IIGS HARDWARE". So
looks like even on an Apple IIe, booting from a CD-ROM is doable!
I'll do some tests with burning some Total Replay CD's and fooling
about with the RamFAST and Apple SCSI controllers. Unfortunately
my equipment is failing....all 3 of my SCSI CD-ROM drives, my spare
Zip drive. Even the built-in speakers on my CRT TV set I'm hooking
the Apple IIe up to! Speaking of time, I need time to sit down and
repair a lot of my vintage hardware!
Mitchell Spector